Heat pumps in space heating

Readers letters

I fail to see what the age and “inefficiency” of the housing has to do with the viability of a heat pump

Being involved in a ground-source heat pump project in Sweden, I read your ”Pump up the heat” article (PE 22 September 2010) with special interest. However, I am at particular odds with the sentence that reads: “The major difference is that the UK has particularly old and inefficient housing stock.”

First of all, what difference? But above all, I fail to see what the age and “inefficiency” of the housing has to do with the viability of a heat pump. The installation of a ground-source heat pump is intended to reduce the energy used for heating a given house. The difference between a well insulated house and a poorly insulated house is that the latter must be equipped with a heat pump with a higher rating than the former. But the percentage improvement will be roughly the same in both cases.

In actual fact, if a heat pump system is installed, the fuel consumption savings on a poorly insulated house will be greater than those on a well insulated house, although the fuel consumption of the former will still be higher than that of the latter.

The underlying tenor of the article sounds to me as though ground-source heat pumps are not considered to be as attractive in the UK as they are in other countries.

Disregarding the economics, to the individual homeowner they definitely are, provided that the equipment and the installation work are up to standard. But from the national economy viewpoint, better insulation of the housing stock is obviously vitally important and merits government support.